Posts tagged “the unyielding”

“Absurdist horror at its best. Gary Shipley had me hooked from beginning to end. Definitely give this one a read.” – Carlton Mellick III, author of Quicksand House

“Horror rarely gets this close to home, spread like anomalous paste – cold, slick and tasty – over the pallid flesh of your nearest and dearest. This is modern family life perfectly rendered into the glue-goo-glow of couch and monitor screen: a sticky rigor vitus of the most banal and inexplicable nuclear necrodomesticity. Weird, absurd, monstrously tragicomic, the story really gets the human nature of horror before oozing somewhere else… Read it and seep.” – Prof. Fred Botting, author of Limits of Horror: Technology, Bodies, Gothic.

Something is horribly wrong with my wife. She doesn’t move anymore. When I try to lift her I can’t. It’s like she’s glued to the floor, or impaled on something. But her body keeps randomly appearing around the house in contorted positions: facedown in the hallway, at the end of our daughter’s bed, and on the ceiling of the main room, her feet, hands and backside flat to the plaster.

There is a cold translucent slime coating her skin. The scent of her is intense and repugnant, and yet I am finding myself increasingly drawn to her. I have a desire to merge with her. The children, too, want to be near her. Sitting on top of her brings them comfort as they stare at their tablets and phones. We stop going to work and to school. We feed from her. We begin to change. And we are not the only ones…

The Unyielding is a darkly surreal tale that details what happens to a family when one of its members becomes an immovable: an entity that while corpse-like is also spatially-inconstant, oddly nutritious, and excessively seductive to surrounding humans. If you’ve ever wondered what philosophical pessimism looks like in the flesh, it looks like this